Category: Farming

The Partridge Foundation has made a $1 million grant to the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. The grant comes with an additional $1 million challenge provided MOFGA can raise an equal amount.

According to a report from the Press Herald,

The Partridge Foundation awarded the money to “seed MOFGA’s work in encouraging a new generation of organic farmers,” according to a written statement from the foundation.

The statement adds that the grant reflects foundation founder Polly Guth’s “deep interest in healthful food and farming in her native New England.” Guth is a native of Manchester, New Hampshire, and her foundation has made grants to Maine organizations before, including several smaller grants to MOFGA.

This Sunday is Maine Open Farm Day, an opportunity to visit and learn more about our local farms. Two dozen farms in Cumberland and York counties are participating in the event this year.

For more information read this article from the American Journal.

Saveur has published a feature about the 2nd generation farmers of the Back to the Land movement in Maine.

As the rest of us get a taste for the benefits of eating local and organic, and small-scale farms start to become more viable, some of the sons and daughters of Maine’s Back to the Landers are staying put—literally on the land where they grew up—and dedicating themselves to small-scale farming with renewed vigor, despite the hardships they witnessed growing up, as many of their parents had to give up farming to make ends meet. “Stay on the Landers,” they sometimes call themselves—these kids, like Ben, who are following through on their parents’ dormant dreams, doing tough, rich work that doesn’t make a lot of money.

The Business section in today’s Press Herald includes an update on Ocean Approved and their kelp farming operation in Casco Bay.

Dobbins said the potential market for the product is huge. Kelp is a $5 billion-a-year industry worldwide, and almost all of it is harvested and dried in Asia, where kelp farms are spread across entire bays. It is a staple of the Asian diet, a nutritious vegetable that doesn’t require any land, fresh water irrigation or fertilizer to produce.

Ocean Approved wants American consumers to think of kelp as a vegetable that can be served with a lot of mainstream dishes rather than just an ingredient in a sushi roll.

Today marks the digital and print debut of Source, a new weekly section in the Maine Sunday Telegram dedicated to “sustainable eating and living” in Maine. The inaugural edition of Source is 22 pages long and includes more than a dozen articles.

One article you should definitely set aside some time to read is the front page piece by Meredith Goad and Mary Pols. It tells the sweeping story of the local food movement in Maine, from Helen and Scott Nearing, homesteading pioneers in the 1950s, to vibrant food scene of today.

There’s an interesting article in today’s Maine Sunday Telegram about Maine farmer Will Bonsall, a leader in the seed saver movement.

The expectation is that Bonsall, 64, will always have at least 700 varieties of potatoes tucked away for posterity, and that every year he will faithfully grow them out, harvest them, share some with other avid growers across the country and put a sampling of each variety back in the cellar in anticipation of the next crop. But a philosophical and political rift with the Iowa-based Seed Savers Exchange, the national seed saving group that helped fund his curating career, has put Bonsall’s potatoes, some deeply obscure and ancient, in jeopardy.